


we lay here (for years or for hours)

by Ro29



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: A mish mash of Canons, Bruce Wayne is Trying, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Vigilantism does not a happy life make, Depression, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Dick Grayson's Guilt Complex, Gen, Hurt Dick Grayson, I haven't seen season 3 of YJ by the way, Introspection, Serious Injuries, Suicidal Thoughts, no beta we die like men, somewhat at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 06:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20577641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ro29/pseuds/Ro29
Summary: It's early morning in Bludhaven and Dick lies injured and alone.He is caught in himself.(There is so much to be sorry for)





	we lay here (for years or for hours)

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically heavily based on Wally's Young Justice death but is a mix and match of canons, so read it with a grain of salt. I found it sitting in my drive so now you all get to deal with it because rereading it made me sad.
> 
> title is from Hozier's song "In a week" which kind of heavily inspired this when I first wrote it.

His breath comes in shallow little gasps, painful and rattling his chest with effort. Every few breaths draw forth hacking coughs and blood, bubbling up and blooming from his lips like some demented parody of a flower that leaves the metallic taste of iron on his tongue.

He’s alone and it’s not a surprise, not really. Nightwing isn’t Robin, there’s no Batman to swoop in and save him, and, for the most part, Dick works alone—he doesn’t have a partner, has _ never _ had one.

(_ he doesn’t think of red hair that never managed to stay neat for long, perpetually windswept. green eyes that shone like emeralds, freckles that dance across the skin like stars and just as numerous. a smile that warms him to the core as if it was the sun itself, blinding and radiant and so happy. _ <strike> _ he has never been quite as good at lying to himself as he is at lying to others _ </strike>)

He’s been alone for a long time.

(_ three years and nine days, longer if you count the fact that he had drifted away from just about everyone before then. and he regrets that because it’s been so, _ so _ long since he last saw the boy who was always so fast, the boy with red hair and green eyes and a smile like the sun. the boy who had hung up the cowl and retired the suit. _ <strike> _ the one he had lead to his death__._</strike>)

And it sucks, but it’s been like that for long enough that he’s accepted it and moved on, and for all his brain would agonize over it, he’s never completely alone.

He still talks to some of his old teammates, he speaks with Alfred when he can, speaks to Tim as well (he tries being for Tim what he was to busy fighting with Bruce to be for Jason, he’s not sure he succeeds but he’s _ trying _ dammit), and yes sometimes he wishes Bruce would shove aside his pride and have an actually productive conversation with him that didn’t feel like an armed bomb, he wishes he could go back to before Jason’s death and set aside his _ own _ hurt and anger to see that it wasn’t Jason’s fault, he wishes he had tried harder to be there for him, he wishes things weren’t so broken between the rest of the family and Jason now. He wishes he actually _ could _ fix anything that went wrong because fuck knows he’s trying, it just never seems to _ work_.

God, he has so many fucking wishes. 

But in the end they really aren’t anything world-shattering, just basic things with maybe a bit of (a lot of) his stupid fucking fear of people leaving him <strike>(</strike> <strike> and of being left to hurt and grieve and live alone </strike>) tossed in there, a remnant of his trauma over his parents' deaths. ‘Fear of Abandonment’ according to Leslie the one time she had tried playing therapist, early on—before trying to get him to talk to an actual professional on mental health—when he still ended up panicky whenever Bruce or Alfred left his sight. Curled up in a ball and sobbing in the corner at night when he couldn’t hide from the memories of blood and cracks and snaps, terrified that if they weren’t with him then they were going away for good. 

But he isn’t a nine-year-old boy in an unknown city anymore, and no matter what his stupid brain thinks—he’s fine. He’s accepted it all (relatively, maybe not everything, but most things), his tense relationships, the good ones, the cracks between him and his family and the knowledge he is loved even if those around him suck at showing it. He’s accepted all of that, just as he’s long since accepted the possibility of him dying. He’d always known the risks to his chosen side-profession after all, being a hero was a death sentence, that was just a fact.

(_ loving Dick Grayson was another. _)

And maybe it’s a little fatalistic, some heroes do live to be old and find a form of happiness, or at the very least grow old, but the sky is still dark, and Dick is having a hard time seeing past the blurriness of his vision, so he thinks his selective point of view right now is acceptable. He probably has a concussion now that he thinks of it—one of the men had hit him hard over the head a few times—and he doesn’t know what time it is. The last time he had checked the time it had been nearing two in the morning, but the fight with the group of thugs had thrown off his sense of time and his thought process wasn’t exactly up to its normal speed. So now Dick lay, unaware of the time, with the knowledge that he was alone and probably going to die like that, bleeding out in an alleyway between two completely unremarkable buildings, in one of the bad parts of Blüdhaven (the city that had already met if not surpassed Gotham in terms of ‘bad’), staring up at the starless sky through the haze of pain and the bleariness that most definitely spoke of a concussion.

(‘_light pollution in the cities, especially big ones, is awful. you can’t see most of the stars because of it’, whispers a pouting boy with red hair [and with his own stars scattered across his skin] complaining to the boy beside him _ _ the boy Dick Grayson used to be _ _ as they lay entwined in a greenfield in the middle of nowhere, gazing up at the unpolluted sky to look upon the stars that burned bright.) _

<strike> Wally West has been dead for three years and Dick is still reminded of freckles covering skin when he sees the stars the speckle the night sky. </strike>

So while Dick doesn’t know what time it _is exactly_, he knows that it’s at least early in the morning.

(_ and it’s a stark contrast to the death he remembers so clearly as happening in the afternoon, the sun shining down brightly on the white arctic snow. or the late night fall that brought the sounds of snapping rope and cracking necks and breaking bodies into his dreams.) _

And Dick has accepted his death (mostly), he isn’t so naive to believe he’ll get through this. His legs are broken and bruised and he _ knows _ that he’ll most likely bleed out soon. And with one arm broken in multiple places and the other dislocated, as well as ribs that are probably cracked or bruised (if they aren’t broken), his survival rate is low. Maybe swinging 35% if he’s being _ extremely _generous and optimistic, and without factoring in the amount of blood he’s hacking up, jostling his injured ribs with every cough and wheeze and causing further damage to his internal organs.

With his luck, the broken bones have probably punctured something important, and between that, the knife wounds, and the already tallied injuries, any optimistic thought he _ might’ve _ had was crushed further.

As it is, the only reason that he’s still alive is the fact that the group he had attempted to stop and arrest had been too focused on getting away with both their contraband and their freedom to be concerned over whether he was alive or not.

And, well, he can’t really call for help either, not with his injuries. And even if he had tried to get a call out, which given his injuries wasn’t a very plausible option, the nearest scheduled patrol he knew of was in Gotham. Nightwing was the cities first, and currently only, hero. Which meant that he had no backup or people to call when he was in over his head and in big trouble.

And for all that he detests the idea of leaving the city unprotected he doesn’t quite know how to feel about his impending death.

(Ok so maybe he _ hasn’t _ actually completely accepted it, but he should’ve by now.)

It sounds morbid, actually it probably _ is _ morbid, but he’s never had a very stable relationship with life or death. He’s existed in the limbo between the two for a long time now. Not in the way Jason does. Jason who came _ back _ to life in his coffin only to almost suffocate and die again barely 10 minutes into his second life, Jason who never really _ left _ the warehouse or that coffin, who’s so haunted and still sometimes looks as if he’s not really there, as if he’s still dead, drifting between being alive and still being dead.

No, Dick Grayson is not quite like that, he’s never properly died, has never been haunted by death blows that did him in only to be brought out of the grave clawing and digging and gasping for air.

But he knows death intimately, has had it follow him all his life like a shadow, a plague, a poison that chips away at him more and more for every person it takes from him. Death is the monster under his bed at night and the villain he can’t defeat, who has spent years eating away at his heart and at his head, who has spent years draining the love Dick gives to others out of him. The poison touch of Dick Grayson’s love has haunted him for long enough that he wonders how he managed to live for as long as he has with all who have fallen victim to it.

It’s more than a little self-centered. And, honestly, it _ is _ an utterly _ morbid _ way to view it all. But when the list of those he had loved and lost has grown so long, and his heart has beat a song of mourning for most of his life, how can he rid himself of the thought? 

When he was little, and still the Dick Grayson who had his parents and flew beside them, he had so _ much _ love in his heart that he felt near to bursting with it. He gave his love freely and was so loved in return that the pain of having your love ripped or drained from you never happened to him. And he gave all of his overflowing love to his family and was always shown just _ how much _he was loved in return and he never felt empty.

When they fell he understood what his father had meant when he said losing people made your heart feel like it was broken, made your head feel sick. Losing them left him alone and he had no one who would hold him or tell him they loved him. He felt drained, and as if all the love he had given to his parents the night they fell, and all the love they had given him, had been buried with them in their graves. 

_ (thinking of his parents makes him feel nauseous, makes the hole in his heart where they used to be ache and filled him with fatigue and a bone-deep sorrow.) _

After that death followed him in a different way, it was the ever-present fear that Bruce _ wouldn’t make it home_. It was the worry about losing someone else and learning that the world can be crueler than the snap of a rope and the crunch of the bodies and the looks on their faces as they fell.

Then it struck again after Bruce and Dick had—kind of but not really, but it felt like they had sometimes, when the tension mounted and speaking to Bruce felt like choking to death—fallen out and Dick had taken up Nightwing, and the little boy who had become Robin, who Dick had finally stopped blaming for something that wasn’t his fault, was gone. Jason Todd was dead and Bruce Wayne was slipping without someone to ground him. But Dick had been trying to fix what had been broken before he had Robin taken away. Nightwing couldn’t go back to who he was before because the little boy who had first become Robin had been gone for a long time. He didn’t think he could stand attempting to be what Bruce needed, what _ Batman _ needed, only to fail and lose his guardian even more than he already had.

That would have shattered him even more than the initial not quite-fight had. That would have torn open wounds in his heart that hadn’t even healed from the build-up and explosion of the words, and it would have taken the still scorching burns on his soul that were Jason’s death and his own guilt and poured salt onto them. It would have reopened all the things he had tried to forget and push behind him.

So Tim was Robin, and Jason was dead, and Bruce still wasn’t all there and pushing everyone away, which left Dick alone again. The team was fractured in places where they had once been so, so close because Tula was _ dead _ and she was still just a _ kid_. _ They were all still just kids _ and they had ignored it before but now they had been forced to remember, confronted with their own mortality, with how much life there still could be for them compared to their own rough estimates of how long they would actually live. 

Because being a hero was dangerous and you spent your entire life knowing that there will one day be a threat you can’t stop _ and _ keep your life afterward.

And that was, perhaps, already enough to know. Because once was an accident, twice made it coincidence (though Dick had learned never to believe in coincidences), but three times made it a pattern. People he cared for, people he loved, died. 

Sure, maybe you could take his family’s death off of the list, brush it off as a tragic accident that he would never have been able to prevent, different from the other two incidents. 

But then you added Wally’s death to the list and you ended up right back where you started. 

Because once was an accident, twice made it coincidence, but three times made it a pattern. 

People he cared for, people he loved, died. 

There was another version of the saying, in the Bond books he had learned Jason used to enjoy reading (maybe still did, but Dick wouldn’t know, Red Hood wasn’t who Jason had once been, just like Nightwing wasn’t who Robin once was, like Dick wasn’t who ‘Mama’s little robin’ had been, or even who Dick Grayson used to be so long ago), _ ‘Once is happenstance, Twice is coincidence, the Third time is enemy action’ _.

But who was the enemy then? In a series of deaths, who was there to blame?

He felt lightheaded and dizzy, disoriented that probably had as much to do with his injuries as his own mind taunting him with its circular thoughts. The disquietude of it all, the morbid thoughts that still haunted him and his own situation. 

(** _Dis_ ** quietude; which was just a fancier, scarier, stronger form of disquiet. **Dis** quiet, which was quiet that had something wrong with it, it was a quiet-everywhere-but-inside-your-head type of worry and fear, the silently creeping anxiety that left you with bitten nails and holes chewed through your cheek or lips. It was the grinding of teeth in the false calm of silence when you know _ something’s _ wrong but not exactly what it is.)

He’s good at compartmentalizing, he has to be with everything he saw as Robin and then everything he’s seen as Nightwing, but he’s never been as good at it as Bruce was. Never been able to separate himself from his hero persona’s so completely, never quite been able to completely block out all the different ways he’s learned people can die, all the choices he’s had to make, the thing’s he’s had to do.

They always seem to come back to him when he closes his eyes, in the moments when he almost thinks he can breathe until he’s reminded of how little the words “I’m fine” actually mean when he says them, the lies he tell with a smile on his face and just enough of everything that not even his family question it too much, look into it too deeply. 

Or maybe his family choose to overlook it because all of them are emotionally constipated in some way or form, all of them need _ so much fucking therapy_. But perhaps most damningly, all of them are just hurt enough, just angry enough, just _ sad _ enough, that doing anything more than the small little nods of acknowledgment is too intimidating. Too close to digging up the things wrong with themselves while they try to figure out what’s wrong with the others.

They take the words for what they are, and they continue on battling their own ugly demons that choose to rear their heads whenever any of them can _ actually _ sit and talk to each other instead of yell and manipulate and blow up on each other. 

(_ it makes it harder to remember sunshine smiles that helped chase away the darkness, with words spoken calmly and brightly to help ease the weight off of Dick’s shoulders and to help give his mind a rest. arms that wrapped him up in a hug, gave him a place to breakdown and speak without judgment. kept him safe for even just that little bit.) _

He laughs; not the cackle from when he was younger, with a father figure who could actually look at him, with siblings who were alive and didn’t hate him, when there was still another with a contagious smile and a burst of colour by his side.

No, this is the broken, gurgling, laugh of a man choking on his own blood and mistakes, already dead on the inside but only just about to heave his last breaths in the world, a man giving himself up to death willingly.

It’s a hollow sound that echoes throughout the city in the early morning hours, one that tells people to avoid the ugly and dreadful creature who rips it from their throat and into existence.

(_ it’s telling that the very first people to love him are dead, and those who chose to love him later are either dead, dying inside like he himself already is, or hate him) _

Dick Grayson will die alone.

(_ as he should.) _

He closes his eyes.

and

slips

away.

* * *

He wakes up, something he hadn’t been expecting to be able to do.

It’s to the sound of beeping and shuffling, and he feels groggy, not all there, but waking up is already more than he thought he would be doing after closing his eyes.

He’s not entirely sure he’s happy about it yet. 

He flinches at the thought, feeling guilt flood in. 

But the flinch jostles his broken body and he gasps, eyes staring unseeing at the white ceiling.

Someone’s talking to him, muffled but there.

“-ick? Dick, look at me please, Dick.”

He turns his head, trying to focus, Bruce is beside him and he looks worried.

For a second Dick doesn’t know why then he realizes that Bruce has been worried for _ him _ and the guilt comes rushing back in.

He smiles, or tries to, and whispers, voice hoarse, “Hey Bruce.”

Bruce looks at him and, for the first time in a long time, Dick watches his guardian cry.

(_ Dick Grayson is a child still yearning for the childhood long gone, for support and love and people to stop dying. _

_ Dick Grayson still isn’t sure he’s happy about waking up. _

_ Dick Grayson has given up and now he watches his mentor, his father-figure, cry and he is lost again, a child. Scared and unsure.) _

Bruce press a faintly trembling hand against Dick’s forehead, rubs his thumb across the skin there and shakes for a brief moment. 

He looks so heartbreakingly human at that moment that Dick feels tears start to well up in his eyes, throat closing up with grief and something unknown.

They sit like that for a little while, Bruce just running his hands through Dick’s hair, until Dick drifts off, eyes heavy and soul-weary.

He isn’t alone for now, and that in and of itself is enough to steal his breath away.

_ (He will bask in this for however long it lasts, he will take whatever he can get until he is left alone again. _

_ He is too needy, too selfish, and yet at this moment he could care less as long as it feels as wonderful as it does right now.) _

<strike> _ (it feels a little like coming home, it feels a little like having someone love him and stay. it feels like being something other than a death magnet.) _ </strike>

He sleeps, calm and unburdened by the thoughts that so recently ravaged his mind.

(_ Dick Grayson drifts off with the tiniest smile on his face, and Bruce Wayne feels something inside of himself break just a bit at the sight.) _

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a while ago but I believe that, originally, I had him die. I'm glad I didn't do that. When I found this a little bit ago it had been planned to continue past this ending, into his recovery, but I found that I liked ending it here better and that since I didn't have the motivation to write the recovery and repercussions properly it would be best to leave it at this.
> 
> [writing tumblr](https://rose-blooms-red.tumblr.com) and [main tumblr](https://themessofthecentury.tumblr.com)


End file.
